Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

By : Anish Chapagain
Book Image

Hands-On Web Scraping with Python

By: Anish Chapagain

Overview of this book

Web scraping is an essential technique used in many organizations to gather valuable data from web pages. This book will enable you to delve into web scraping techniques and methodologies. The book will introduce you to the fundamental concepts of web scraping techniques and how they can be applied to multiple sets of web pages. You'll use powerful libraries from the Python ecosystem such as Scrapy, lxml, pyquery, and bs4 to carry out web scraping operations. You will then get up to speed with simple to intermediate scraping operations such as identifying information from web pages and using patterns or attributes to retrieve information. This book adopts a practical approach to web scraping concepts and tools, guiding you through a series of use cases and showing you how to use the best tools and techniques to efficiently scrape web pages. You'll even cover the use of other popular web scraping tools, such as Selenium, Regex, and web-based APIs. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently scrape the web using different techniques with Python and other popular tools.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Web Scraping
3
Section 2: Beginning Web Scraping
8
Section 3: Advanced Concepts
13
Section 4: Conclusion

Deploying a web crawler

Deploying a web crawler online or on a live server will certainly improve the effectiveness of the crawling activity, with its speed, updated technology, web spaces, anytime usage, and so on. Local tests and confirmation are required before deploying online. We need to own or buy web spaces with web-hosting companies or the cloud server.

Scrapy Cloud at https://scrapinghub.com/scrapy-cloud from Scrapinghub at https://scrapinghub.com/ is one of the best platforms to deploy and manage the Scrapy Spider. The Scrapy Cloud provides an easy and interactive interface to deploy Scrapy and is free, with some of the additional features listed here:

  • Coding/managing and running Spider
  • Deploying Spider to cloud
  • Downloading and sharing data
  • API access with resource management

The following are the steps performed to deploy projects using Scrapy Cloud:

  1. Open the web...